Is an “Acknowledgement of Confidentiality” legally enforceable?
Located in Pennsylvania
I have been working for an equipment manufacturer for 18 years in various roles from individual contributor to Director. I’m currently in Sales, and someone within our “Emerging Technology” group says he wants to discuss some new designs with a couple of my customers that are in that space, but before he can talk to me about it, he needs me to sign this “NDA”.
The file name says “Internal NDA Sprint”, but the document heading is “Acknowledgement of Confidentiality”, it’s a 1 page document that states the code name of the internal development project, says everything related to it is potentially confidential, then has a list of 4 things I acknowledge (basically pulled from our Code of Conduct), then states any violation of this acknowledgement will result in disciplinary action up to and including termination.
I’ve never been asked to sign something like this from my company on a specific product/project basis. There was no NDA or CDA when starting employment, we just go through our Code of Conduct training on an annual basis which includes confidential and proprietary information.
I have no intention on violating this whatsoever, but I make a habit of being skeptical of new processes for something I’ve been through 100 times already. Is this something that’s legally enforceable, or if something were to occur, where I was in violation, would they be forced to point to our Code of Conduct for termination purposes anyway?